Drama about AI data centers enters Oscar race

“Humans in the Loop,” Aranya Sahay’s movie about women working in data centers in rural India, will enter the Academy Awards race.

The film, which premiered in December 2024 in Mumbai, has officially qualified to be a contender for the 98th Academy Awards, where it will compete to be in the Best Original Screenplay category, Variety reports.

It tells the story of women working in data centers in rural India. They work on data annotation and labeling, a process crucial for training artificial intelligence (AI).

The film is inspired by a 2022 article by journalist Karishma Mehrotra, published in Fifty Two, that sheds light on a racial and class dynamic in AI data training.

As the global demand for data soars, tech companies located in the Global North turn to workers in developing countries for training data at a lower cost.

​While such jobs create employment opportunities for people from unprivileged backgrounds, they have been associated with labor exploitation and environmental harm, and are often seen as a form of digital colonialism.

The movie was awarded the Sloan Distribution Grant, which is given by Film Independent and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The grant supports features that engage meaningfully with science or technology themes, and will be used to reach wider audiences through strategic release support. Among the previous recipients are “Oppenheimer” and “The Imitation Game.”

“Humans in the Loop” is available to watch on Netflix.

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